Reference Designs

Description

Energy Harvesting (EH), also known as energy scavenging, is the use of ambient energy to provide electrical power for small electronic and electrical devices. TI provides reference designs, ICs and other solutions that eliminates the dependency of the system on battery power and reduces the need to service the system: An Energy Harvesting System consists of an Energy Harvester Module and a processor/transmitter block. The Energy Harvester module captures energy from light, vibration, thermal or biological sources. A possible source of energy also comes from RF such as emitted from cell phone towers. The power is then conditioned and stored within a battery, an efficient quick charging capacitor or one of the newly developed thin film batteries. The system is then triggered at the required intervals to take a sensor reading, through a low power system. This data is then processed and transmitted to the base station.